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Conradson, Stacey & Pedro Hernández-Ramos (2004). Computers, the internet, and cheating among secondary school students: some implications for educators. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 9(9). Retrieved March 3, 2015 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=9&n=9 . This paper has been viewed 84,118 times since 3/30/200.

Computers, The Internet, and
Cheating Among Secondary School Students: Some Implications for Educators

Stacey Conradson & Pedro Hernández-Ramos
Santa Clara University

This
article investigates in greater depth one particular aspect of cheating within
secondary education and some implications for measuring academic achievement.
More specifically, it examines how secondary students exploit the Internet for
plagiarizing schoolwork, and looks at how a traditional method of educational
assessment, namely paper-based report and essay writing, has been impacted by
the growth of Internet usage and the proliferation of computer skills among
secondary school students. One of the conclusions is that students’ technology
fluency is forcing educators to revisit conventional assessment methods.
Different options for combating Internet plagiarism are presented, and some
software tools as well as non-technology solutions are evaluated in light of
the problems brought about by “cyberplagiarism.”

Is student cheating on the
rise in our secondary schools? Most researchers concur that the incidence of
academic misconduct in our middle schools and high schools has increased
significantly in recent years (Underwood and Szabo, 2003; Petress, n.d.). In
fact, the preponderance of statistical and anecdotal evidence underscores
several disturbing trends, indicating that cheating at the secondary level is
not only occurring more frequently, but that students are using much more
sophisticated methods for their transgressions. Although educators and
academics disagree on the root causes of this alarming behavior, there is
little dispute that the accessibility of computers, the Internet, and other
electronic resources such as CD-ROM encyclopedias has made cheating quicker and
easier for our current generation of technology-savvy teenagers. “Cybercheating,”
meaning the use of technology tools in inappropriate ways for academic work, is
on the rise.

The
intent of this article is not to suggest that
technology use inevitably results in aberrant student behavior. Rather, the
investigation of “cybercheating” provides some useful insights on a complex
social and educational debate about the role schools should play in preparing
students with the skills needed for the workforce of the twenty-first century. Fulton
(1997) persuasively argues that schools must change traditional approaches to
learning in order to help today’s students acquire the skill sets required for
succeeding in the workplace of the future. These advanced skills will be
achieved “through the learner’s interactions with content” in the “digital age”
and not through “the transmission of facts” (Fulton, 1997). In other words,
technological changes have rendered traditional methods of teaching and
assessment in education less effective and less relevant—at least from the
perspective of many students and quite a few educators as well. Shaw (2003),
for example, argues that “we will have to design assessment tools that are more
reflective of the way knowledge and information are used in the adult world”
(p.39).

The Cyberplagiarism Problem in
Secondary Schools

Cromwell (2000) claims that
“Many trend watchers think cheating is epidemic, usually beginning in middle
school and extending though college.” Schulte (2002) reported the results of a Rutgers
University study based on 4,500 high school students from 25 high schools
around the country. The study found that 72 percent of the students admitted to
“seriously cheating on a written work” and more than half had “copied portions
of a paper from the Internet without citing the source.” Donald McCabe, the
founder of the Center for Academic Integrity, is quoted as saying that

“…cheating is starting younger—in
elementary school in fact. And by the time students hit middle and high school,
cheating is, for many, like gym class and lunch period, just part of the fabric
of how things are….What’s changed is technology. It’s made cheating so easy.
And the vast realms of information on the truly, worldwide Web are so readily
available. Who could resist?” (in
Schulte, 2002).

In a different article
(Thomas, 2001), McCabe is quoted asserting that “High-schoolers are much more
likely than college students to use the Net to cheat, and computers have
redefined younger kids’ concept of what constitutes cheating.” McCabe also
claims, based on his findings, that 15 to 20 percent of high-schoolers have
bought or downloaded papers from one of the many paper mill websites to submit
as their own work.

Educational Communications
(1998), based on a survey of the top scholastic high school achievers selected
from the annual Who’s Who Among American High School Students “honor
roll,” found that four out of every five students admitted to cheating during
their high school career to improve grades. This 1998 poll resulted in the
highest percentage of cheating honor students in the thirty-year history of the
program. Of particular concern was the fact that 53 percent of the respondents
felt cheating was “no big deal.”

There are a multitude of
sources corroborating the above findings. For example, research by the Josephson
Institute of Ethics (1998) is another example of a frequently quoted survey
involving 20,829 middle and high school students, where 70 percent reported
that they had cheated in school. It should be noted that while some in academia
and elsewhere have found fault with some of the survey techniques, or have
questioned the interpretation of some data, the overwhelming proportion of
literature suggests that student plagiarism at the secondary level is a
pervasive practice, with significant percentages of students copying directly
from the Internet and other electronic sources without proper attribution. For
example, in their meta-analysis of studies on cheating Athanasou & Olasehinde
(2002) found that “substantial proportions of males and females engaged in
cheating at high school and that substantial proportions continued cheating in
college or university.”

Intentional and Unintentional Plagiarism

Dr. Jamie McKenzie, editor
of the online educational journal From Now On (www.fno.org),
claims that many students engaged in plagiarism truly do not understand that
the exercise of cutting and pasting into a paper without attribution is morally
wrong. “They [students] don’t think of it as cheating. They are simply
collecting information and don’t understand the whole concept of intellectual
property” (quoted in Hafner, 2001). Many academic experts on plagiarism concur
with this point of view. In other words, students who have acquired a certain
view toward intellectual property (if they recognize the concept at all) with
respect to music, movies, email, jokes, photos, and other web-related content
assume that there’s nothing illegal or unethical about taking or copying
material from the web for the fulfillment of school assignments. Given that
many teachers in secondary education often lack the familiarity and
Internet-related skills that their students have, they are prone to
misinterpret acts of copying as deliberate cheating. Teachers—particularly those
working in middle and high schools—need to consider that their students’ use of
content without proper attribution often represent inadvertent incidents of
cheating.

Straw (2000) argues that
educators must learn to discern “Acts of academic dishonesty committed with
deliberate intent… [from]… the unintentional results of inexperience and
ignorance.” He further observes that “…students are stunned to learn that the
sites they’re using are created by individuals who need to be acknowledged. The
structure of the Internet must be seen as a culprit in creating much of this
confusion. A great deal of electronic information lacks the tangible physical
presence of print sources.” If more than a century earlier Rhodes (1899) had to
remind his fellow historians that “the study of history is a training in the
handling of books,” we may find it necessary to alert all instructors that
teaching and learning in the twenty-first century must include training in the
“handling” of the rich technology-based information resources—including
electronic books—available now.

Providing a simple
definition of “plagiarism” is a good starting point for helping students gain a
clearer understanding of acceptable uses of other authors’ writings. Pearson
(2002) defines plagiarism as “Presenting someone else’s ideas or work as your
own, without attribution.” Pearson urges teachers to set clear expectations
about the originality of schoolwork, and to discuss the importance of doing
one’s own critical thinking in terms of the learning process. She pragmatically
suggests that “those who cheat are going to do it no matter what I say…my job
is to help (students) think about it, and to let them make their own informed
choices.”

In short, the various types
of plagiarism run the gamut from students’ not knowing at all about the need to
properly acknowledge their sources, to believing a source to be common
knowledge—thus committing an innocent error in judgment biased in favor of
their own sense of “originality”—to a student’s submission of a paper entirely
composed by another author, hence, consciously executing an overt act of
academic dishonesty. Educators at the secondary level need to become aware of
and learn to differentiate egregious transgressions from the more innocuous
cases of cheating without an explicit intent. This could be accomplished
through in-service opportunities focused on this cheating, or by making widely
available information specifically developed for teachers to help them cope
with this challenge (e.g., Hurwitz and Hurwitz, 2004; Creech and Johnson,
1999).

Deliberate Plagiarism and the Use of Paper Mill
Websites

The proliferation of
websites offering term paper services has not only unleashed a fury of
controversy in academic circles, but has given rise to new ways of promoting
and facilitating student cheating, especially at the high school level. In
fact, one source estimates that 60 percent of all papers downloaded for
purposes of plagiarism are acts committed by high school students (Plagiarism
and the Web, 2002). Other researchers suggest that, due to the generally poor
quality of papers found on “paper mill” sites, many of the submissions would
not be considered acceptable work at the college level.

In examining their
offerings, a sampling of paper mill sites provides a range of online services
from digital “Cliff Notes” or lecture notes, to free and “for fee” essays and
term papers, as well as editing and custom design services for college-quality
papers which command fees of up to $30/per page. Since a racketeering lawsuit
filed by Boston University threatened to shut down a list of these sites by
name (the suit was later struck down by the courts), most sites now publish a
disclaimer that their offerings are intended solely for “research
purposes”—thus inferring that their content is not supposed to be used with an
intent to cheat and/or plagiarize. These warnings are obviously not monitored,
nor are any enforcement measures taken.

To get a rough idea of the
extent to which these web businesses influence or facilitate student
plagiarism, it is useful to look at the magnitude of web traffic they generate.
Paul Roberts, the founder of Cheater.com, for instance, claimed that in the
late 1990s his firm signed up 80 to 100 members every day, and the site
received roughly 13,000 daily hits (Clayton, 1997). Kenny Sahr, who launched
the website School Sucks (www.schoolsucks.com),
asserts his site attracted about 10,000 unique visitors per day (Glasner,
2002). Sahr quips that “…besides casinos or porn [the paper mill sites are the
only ones] making money on the Internet” now. When asked whether his business
encourages cheating, Sahr remarked that his site is “a stupid place to
plagiarize from” (Glasner, 2002). As a shameless, self-proclaimed industry
spokesman, Sahr admits to stirring the pot and putting audiences, especially
teachers, on the defensive:

“What worries me is that educators
are worried about School Sucks. A teacher who’s giving original and creative
assignments, who’s reading the students’ writing and knows what it’s like, has
nothing to fear from School Sucks” (Cromwell, 2000).

The tagline at Sahr’s
website is “ Download your Workload.” The reality is that such messages fly
directly in the face of values such as academic integrity and individual
accomplishment. Judging by the number of paper mill sites currently in
business, and the growth of paper mill Internet addresses (or URLs), one must
conclude that, as long as these sites are attracting visitors, whether educators
like it or not these enterprising publishers are here to stay.

There are three major types
of web sites used by students interested in “downloading their workload.” The
first are lecture note sites, the second are term paper and essay sites, and
the third are editorial services sites. The first two categories have some
“free” offerings (in exchange for opening an “account” where private
information including an email address must be provided), such as SparkNotes (www.sparknotes.com), now owned by Barnes
& Noble. The cost for papers bought from these publishers runs from as
little as $5/per page up to a minimum per paper charge of $500 for highly
specialized topics. The price of a paper bought at one of these vendors might
fall into a range of $30 to $100, plus delivery charges in most cases, which is
a fee range many secondary students would find within their budgets.

In surfing these sites one
discovers a myriad of services offered. In an attempt to differentiate one site
from another, some of the more savvy marketers advertise deliberate
misspellings and grammatical mistakes in their papers so as to avoid arousing
teachers’ suspicions. Other sites provide detailed instructions for
paraphrasing so as to escape detection by one of the search engines designed
explicitly to uncover student plagiarism. Clearly, the founders and owners of
the paper mill businesses maintain a watchful eye on the legal and technical
issues potentially impacting their market, and have thus far managed to stay a
step ahead of those who want to shut them down.

Reversing the Trend: Some Practical Solutions

There is a wide array of
options available to educators designed to deter students from committing
plagiarism and/or cheating in their writing assignments. There are three
general categories of techniques that teachers and administrators may deploy to
combat this particular aspect of student cheating, including: 1) the
application of commercial, technology-based tools for detecting plagiarized
schoolwork, 2) the establishment of academic policies for reducing cheating
behaviors, and 3) the re-evaluation and redesign of traditional methods of
educational assessment.

Commercial Tools for the
Detection of Plagiarized Content

With the proliferation of
web-based content and the online paper mill businesses, technology savvy
teachers and administrators have fought back by seeking electronic methods for
catching offenders. In response to educators’ needs, commercial offerings for
detecting web-based cheating have evolved. Currently, the available tools range
from free, mainstream search engines such as Google or AltaVista, to the
deployment of services such as TurnItIn.com, a sophisticated offering that does
text string matching against approximately 1.5 billion web pages. Some of the
more popular detection services, in addition to TurnItIn, include IntegriGuard,
WordCheck Software, and Essay Verification Engine (Eve 2.2). Fees for these
services, although differently structured, typically include a monthly flat
rate or an annual minimum service charge, with a nominal fee per document. (It
bears mentioning that not all public secondary schools are in a position to
afford this type of specialized service.)

Once a school, district, or
an individual instructor signs up for an anti-plagiarism service, their
students must submit electronic copies of their work, which are then uploaded
to the respective service. The software engine in these services uses
algorithms to match up identical text strings from the student’s paper with
content sources found on the web or in databases of other students’ papers and
essays. TurnItIn, for example, maintains a huge repository of the student
papers that are sent to the service. New submissions are compared with its
existing database and then added to the repository. Once submissions are reviewed,
scores are returned to the instructors indicating “original” content.

John Barrie, the founder of
TurnItIn, estimates that in about 85 percent of the cases when students are
caught plagiarizing it is because they cut and paste directly from web pages;
and another 13 to14 percent of the occurrences of plagiarism are due to
students copying from other students (Reagan, 2002). Barrie claims that less
than one percent of the time does plagiarized work come from a paper mill
source. However, it is reasonable to assume that if students are told their
papers will be electronically analyzed, the vast majority will take measures to
avoid turning in plagiarized web content, knowing there is a high probability
of being caught and disciplined.

Are these technology-based
tools effective deterrents? At Bullard High School, a pilot user of TurnItIn,
teacher Sophia Smith claimed that after TurnItIn was implemented “the
plagiarism rate in my class went from around 20 percent down to zero between
the first and second assignment” (Atkins and Nelson, 2001). Barrie, the
founder, asserts that TurnItIn has monitored assignments from “hundreds of high
schools” and that roughly 20 percent of papers sent to his service contain some
portion of plagiarized content. Compared to similar surveys, this percentage
may be slightly inflated. After all, Barrie’s claims may be less conservative
due to a vested interest in growing his business.

Despite their
self-proclaimed successes, some plagiarism experts meet these technology tools
with skepticism. Although many educators concede that commercial tools are
effective in discouraging some cheaters, the anti-plagiarism services remain
problematic for several reasons. Once a teacher catches a student, there is
frequently a reluctance to exercise punitive measures, usually because schools
lack clear directives on how to handle these awkward situations; also, teachers
and schools are skittish about the potential legal liability of accusing
students of cheating. (For example, Gross (2003) makes reference to a
psychologist working in an affluent district where “some [parents] threaten to
sue over any disciplinary measure that might mar a college transcript.”). Some educators
feel that the use of such tools sends the wrong message to their students and
that these technologies engender an atmosphere of mistrust. Other public
schools balk at the cost. Still others contend that the scores derived include
too many “false positives.” In other words, not all software engines are
calibrated to identify proper attribution. This article, for instance, relies
heavily on cited quotations, and could, in theory, trigger a false plagiarism
score! Lastly, some educators believe that there are better, alternative
methods to address the cheating problem, and shun the anti-plagiarism
technology services.

Setting Clear Policies For
Academic Integrity

The media and educators
alike have given the plagiarism issues at our schools a heightened visibility.
As a result, many schools have designed and published integrity policies and
honor codes explicitly covering Internet usage, or, else have modified older,
more traditional policy statements. Carroll and Appleton (2001) contend that a
“balanced institutional response” that includes “enhanced teaching and learning
strategies against a backdrop of a clear, fair and effective disciplinary
procedure” is the best way for schools to ensure against plagiaristic
practices. For the secondary grades, schools and individual teachers should
publish clear definitions of what constitutes plagiarism, how to avoid it, and
what the consequences will be for students. Many schools encourage teachers to
give lessons on the differences between copying and paraphrasing, and how to
provide proper attribution. Some examples of “Honor Codes” and “Cheating
Policies” can be found online for both middle schools and high schools,
including at the websites of the following institutions: El Toro High School
(Lake Forest, CA; http://eths.svusd.org/pol.html#ethics), Langley High School
(McLean, VA; http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/LangleyHS/saxon/honor.html), H.E. Huntington Middle School (San Marino, CA;
http://www.san-marino.k12.ca.us/~heh/
BinderReminder/discipline.html), and the Webb School (Knoxville, TN;
https://www.webbschool.org/today/academics/upper/philosophy.asp).

Lathrop and Foss (2000) and
McCabe and Klebe Treviño (2002) assert that honor codes, where students are
expected to assume responsibility for their own actions and commit to integrity
pledges, help inculcate anti-cheating attitudes in the school culture, and
thereby lessen the incidence of cheating. Based on the results of a third party
study, Lathrop and Foss (2000) reported that “Honor codes appeared to be a
major influence in reducing cheating among students,” while McCabe and Klebe Treviño
(2002) found that in college campuses, “The impact of honor codes, both
traditional and modified, is surprisingly strong on many campuses, suggesting
that an ethical appeal to students—rooted in a sense of community
responsibility— can help reduce cheating.” Many K-12 schools now also require
students (and sometimes, their parents as well) to sign an “Acceptable Use”
agreement covering computers, the Internet, and other electronic resources at
school that also spells out consequences (up to and including expulsion) for
infringements ranging from inappropriate use to plagiarism and other forms of
academic dishonesty. Such written policies, and their proper communication
within schools, helps students understand that the institution will deal with
academic dishonesty with the seriousness it deserves.

While most students are
willing to state in writing that they will abide by the rules of their school’s
honor code, the overwhelming majority of students will not “tattletale” on a
fellow student who breaks the code. It appears that students steadfastly draw
the line at policies attempting to get them to report on one another. Even when
students are put at a disadvantage grade-wise, the research underscores the
reluctance of students to “rat.”

In sum, the most important
aspect of a school’s honor code seems to be the role that students themselves
play in developing and carrying out the policies (Gross, 2003). McCabe (2001)
reports that “the level of serious cheating on written assignments is 25 to 33
percent lower” when students are stakeholders in the honor code processes.
Thus, where students are participating on school enforcement boards and levying
their own sanctions, honor code systems have far greater influence on reducing
academic misconduct.

Re-examining
Traditional Assessment Methods

To help educators resolve
the ethical dilemmas posed by plagiarism and Internet usage,it
is becoming necessary to design new ways of assessing learning and/or skill
attainment for secondary education. Traditional modes of assessment,
specifically term papers and essays, represent valid indicators of academic
achievement in a pre-computer era when access to information was largely
limited to interpersonal and print sources and there were no electronic writing
tools (e.g., word processors, spell checkers, thesauruses, CD-ROM
encyclopedias, the World Wide Web). Given the dynamics of today’s workplace and
our educational environment, it becomes less clear that these scholastic
assessments are still as meaningful and/or relevant as they once were,
especially with respect to the acquisition of information literacy skills.

Fulton (1997) looked into
the future and made some predictions about the prerequisite skills that our
secondary students will need to participate successfully in the global economy
over the next decade. She argues that, while the need to hone critical thinking
abilities will not go away, the approach to learning will change significantly,
suggesting that “advanced skills of comprehension, reasoning, composition, and
experimentation” will be learned through “experience and (the creation) of mental
structures…which organize and synthesize the information and experiences which
the individual encounters in the world.” Moreover, she claims, “the technology
pull of the Internet will force the issue of developing broader information
literacy skills.” Students, in other words, will need to be far more discerning
about the “undigested” information they access on the Internet, and capable of
“making critical judgments about its value, reliability, and validity.”
Lastly, Fulton (1997) describes the profile of the future workers as
technology-savvy and collaborative problem-solvers who are also “effective
communicators using a variety of appropriate technologies/media.”

Assessment indicators such
as the traditional essay and term paper fall short of measuring these types of
skills that our students require for the digital economy. Term papers represent
academic exercises geared toward individual performance. Essays are typically
based on information from authenticated, traditional information sources such
as textbooks and library materials. Hence, these assignments do not indicate
how well students have learned to work collaboratively to solve problems; nor
do they measure the students’ ability to quickly delve through virtual
avalanches of information, such as found on the web, and make critical
distinctions between what is not and what is useful.

Consequently, many
educators today find themselves in the midst of a sharpening pedagogical
conflict. On the one hand, moving away from traditional assessment methods in
favor of more authentic forms of assessment may help mitigate some of the
undesirable consequences of technology and Internet usage, such as plagiarism,
and help students become better prepared for the technological fluency demands
of the future workplace. However, pressures originating in (among other
sources) mandated curriculi, standardized testing requirements, parental
expectations, and general inertia make it unlikely that most educators would
abandon term paper or essay writing in the near future.

Recognizing the implicit
difficulties facing educators caught in this dilemma, and, more specifically,
focusing on ways to reduce plagiarism, several authors (e.g., McKenzie, 1998; Minkel,
2002; McCullen, 2003) have made pragmatic recommendations for secondary school
teachers to incorporate into their classroom practice. The following represents
a brief summary of some suggestions on how to design school assignments and
assessments to discourage (or even prevent) cheating and/or plagiarism from
electronic or other sources:

Avoid assigning the same or very commonly used essay topics every
year to the same classes.

Familiarize oneself with the quality and skill levels of the
student’s writing before assigning a term paper. Short in-class assignments can
accomplish this goal.

Do not use open-ended subjects as assignments. Be very specific
in the design of the assignment.

Know what’s available online prior to introducing the subject
matter of the composition to the class.

Let students know that you know about online sources for
term papers and the like and put them on notice that you’ll be watching for
transgressions such as plagiarism.

Schedule progress reports on students’ research and writing
projects. Require outlines, bibliographies, and even drafts prior to submission
of the final written product.

Require oral presentations based on original student-produced
materials.

Use peer groups to comment on drafts and final papers.

Allow for collaborative projects in written assignments. Change
the assessment criteria to accommodate a grading scheme that allows for
individual assessment based on contributions within the group.

Devise different formats such as scripts, journals, timelines,
comparative ideas, interviews, and other creative approaches for assignments.

Change the perspective of the narration to first person (e.g., a
historical witness or a newspaper reporter).

Use web portfolios or other technology-driven formats such as
presentations or digital movies.

Allow alternative media such as art projects, where students turn
in a storyboard or a comic strip instead of a paper.

Engage students in online discussions using private or secure
systems (to guard students’ privacy), specifying the levels and types of
participation required (e.g., at least three original postings of 200 words or
more in reply to a teacher’s or peer’s posting within a one-week period).

Involve students in the development of assessment rubrics that
lay out clear expectations for their work.

An outstanding resource for
examples and case studies on the use of these alternative strategies is the
George Lucas Educational Foundation’s website (www.glef.org),
in particular the sections on Assessment, Project-Based Learning, Technology
Integration, and Digital Divide.

Summary and Conclusions

This article has considered
assertions and reviewed some evidence that the incidence of student plagiarism
has had a significant increase at the secondary school level. The Internet and
the development of computer competencies among secondary school students have
facilitated a practice of “cutting and pasting” web-based text and other
electronic resources without proper attribution. Descriptions of representative
websites used for the purposes of plagiarism and of some technologies designed
to combat the problem have been provided. A brief review of some non-technical
methods for deterring inappropriate uses of materials from the web has been
presented, including a look at honor codes for maintaining academic integrity,
and assessment formats designed for teachers to discourage plagiarism. Lastly,
a contention has been made that traditional assessment methods in secondary
education need to be re-examined and redesigned for the digital economy of the
near future—and in some measure, the here and now.

The tension between
teachers and students, between those who assess and those being assessed, will
continue as long as attitudes toward the assessment process continue to
emphasize individual performance in what students perceive to be irrelevant
tasks and products created for an audience of one—the teacher. The prevalence
of student cheating on term papers beginning so early in the current education
system suggests that teaching strategies and the social and cultural values
have been deeply influenced by technology, particularly the ease with which
people can now access vast amounts of information. The value of writing a paper
for students’ academic, intellectual, cognitive, social, and even moral
development did not go away with the increased availability of the Internet and
other electronic resources. However, the practice of assigning writing tasks
with high-stakes to students who have been (or think that that they have been)
ill-prepared to do well in them raises valid issues of fairness and accuracy in
assessment.

The fact that papers may
have served the academic community well for several hundred years does not mean
that the value of this practice is guaranteed in the future, along with
standardized tests based on multiple-choice questions and other forms of
“traditional” assessment (Wiggins and McTighe, 1998). The high incidence of
cheating serves also as an invitation to examine systematically the teaching
and assessment practices in elementary, middle, and high schools to consider
whether subtle or dramatic shifts in the teaching of Language Arts may have
contributed to this problem. Are students being asked to write less than
before? Are teachers paying the same levels of attention to students’ writing
and giving detailed, quality feedback? Are schools engaging students in
meaningful conversations about intellectual property, authorship, and academic
integrity? To the extent that the answers to these questions are negative, the
problem of cheating moves beyond the students engaged in the practice to their
teachers, their schools, and their communities.

In other words, “cybercheating”
happens not just because students have access to the Internet or CD-ROM
encyclopedias, but also because the high-stakes consequences of the educational
system’s investment in assessment puts enormous pressures on students to “do
well” in papers and tests that they can’t relate to their lives and the futures
they envision for themselves. This does not mean that, for example, students
should not be presented with the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of
Hamlet—only that perhaps a term paper may not be the best way to motivate the
student to read, consider, ponder, analyze, compare, contrast, synthesize, and
other tasks in relation to Shakespeare’s masterpiece. For teachers, the
motivating challenge should not be figuring out how to “catch” students who
plagiarize, but how to frame the assignment in such a way that students won’t
see the need to plagiarize and cheat. This is the third solution outlined
above, and it’s easy to see that it’s also the one that would take the longest
to implement fully. A technology-based solution or the publication of policies
that carry serious negative consequences for those caught cheating can be
important first steps for institutions where the third option is not viable (at
least in the short-term). However, no one should assume that reliance on the
first two solutions (technology or policy) will make it possible to ignore the
need to examine the core teaching and assessment practices eventually, perhaps
leading to major changes in what work is demanded of students and how it is
evaluated.

Creech, K. and
Johnson, J. (1999). Cybercheating. Originally printed
in the January 1999 issue of InfoTech: The Advisory List, published by
Educational Resources Evaluation Services of the North Carolina Department of
Public Instruction. [Retrieved online October 19, 2003.]

Educational
Communications. (1998). Cheating and Succeeding: Record Numbers of Top High
School Students Take Ethical Shortcuts. Who’s Who Finds Troubling Trends, Some Good News in 29th Annual Survey of High
Achievers. [Retrieved online November 12, 2002 from:
http://www.eci-whoswho.com/highschool/annualsurveys/29.shtml.]